AUTOBIOGRAPHY 7 



general, arose out of the fact that I — the victor — had a black 

 eye, while he — the vanquished — had none, so that I got into 

 disgrace and he did not. We made it up, and thereafter I was 

 unmolested. One of the greatest shocks I ever received in 

 my life was to be told a dozen years afterwards by the groom 

 who brought me my horse in a stable-yard in Sydney that he 

 was my quondam antagonist. He had a long story of fam- 

 ily misfortune to account for his position, but at that time 

 it was necessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious 

 strangers in New South Wales, and on inquiry I found that 

 the unfortunate young man had not only been "sent out," 

 but had undergone more than one colonial conviction. 



As I grew older, my great desire was to be a mechanical 

 engineer, but the fates were against this and, w^hile very 

 young, I comr^enced the study of medicine under a medical 

 brother-in-law. But, though the Institute of Mechanical 

 Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I 

 have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer in par- 

 tibus infidelium. I am now occasionally horrified to think 

 how very little I ever knew or cared about medicine as the 

 art of healing. The only part of my professional course 

 which really and deeply interested me was physiology, w^hich 

 is the mechanical engineering of living machines; and, not- 

 withstanding that natural science has been my proper busi- 

 ness, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist 

 in me. I never collected anything, and species work was 

 always a burden to me; what I cared for was the architec- 

 tural and engineering part of the business, the working out 

 the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands 

 of diverse living constructions, and the modifications of simi- 

 lar apparatuses to serve diverse ends. The extraordinary 

 attraction I felt towards the study of the intricacies of living 

 structure nearly proved fatal to me at the outset. I was a 



